Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation and his MacArthur genius grantfor his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked stories that stands with The Lazarus Project as the best work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have never been published before; the others have appeared in The New Yorker, and several of those have also been included in The Best American Short Stories. All are infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and illustrious voices of our time. What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the narrator, a young man wholike Hemon himselfwas raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the complicationsthe obstaclesof growing up in a Communist but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood. But because its Aleksandar Hemon, the stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely, as cohesive and powerful as any fiction achingly human, charming, and inviting.

Kindle

From inside front cover: A novella and stories that are linked by characters, by locations, by interwoven substories, and by a literary voice ... Set in Chicago and Sarajevo, it is a book about the trauma of war, about how an exile makes a new life in a new land. Some of the stories in the book have appeared, in different form, in the following publications: "Islands" in Ploughsares and Best American Short Stories, 1999; "The Life and Work of Aphonse Kauders" in TriQuarterly and, in Serbo-Croatian, in Best Yugoslav Short Stories 1990; "The Sorge Spy Ring." in TriQuarterly; "Exchange of Pleasant Words" in Granta; "A Coin" in Chicago Review; and extracts from "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" in The New Yorker and The Baffler.

"Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with his casually multi-ethnic group of friends, resentment of his younger sister, and occasional trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father, and a young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then there is Chicago -- war breaking out at home and the city fully under siege, the Hemon family fleeing Sarajevo (with their dog) and all they had ever known, applying for asylum, and Hemon himself starting his own family in this new city. And yet this is not really a memoir. Like Hemon's fiction, The Book of My Lives defies convention and expectation. It is a love-song to two different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean to the bonds of family; it is a stirring exhortation to go out and play soccer -- and not for the exercise. It is a book driven by passions but built on fierce intelligence, devastating experience, and sharp insight. And like the best narratives, it is a book that will leave you a different reader -- a different person, with a new way of looking at the world. For fans of Hemon's fiction, The Book of My Lives is simply indispensable; for the uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the great writers of our time."--Publisher's description.

"Simple text and photographs describe the heart and how it works"--Provided by publisher.

Bosnian American writer Aleksandar Hemon came to Chicago in 1992 for a month-long cultural exchange program and was supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1--the same day the city came under siege. Granted asylum in the United States as a political refugee, Hemon began writing fiction. Islands, one of his first stories written in English, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1999. An acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, and Love and Obstacles. His new book is a collection of autobiographical essays.